One of the writers with Kojima Productions has written a politely scathing piece in which he decries the JRPG’s single-minded obsession with having overwrought teenage boys as their protagonists, suggesting that is tied to a wider lack of heroic adult male archetypes in contemporary Japanese culture.

The writer in question is Etsu Temari, a man credited with work on the Metal Gear series, and he writes the following short piece on the Kojima Productions Blog:

What is the ideal hero?

“Why are JRPG heroes always teenage boys worried about why they are fighting?”

I’ve been considering this, and I really think it’s because in today’s Japan there is no ideal of a “cool adult man.”

In works based on a shonen [boy] protagonist it’s fine to use them if they are done well, but in both reality and in fiction the “cool man” has mostly disappeared. The generations reared without ever seeing them can’t envision these men either.

I get the impression this vicious circle has indeed become something of a problem.

As a scenario writer myself, I’d like to do what I can to change this by creating new images of heroes.

However, this rather validates Temari’s point that the lack of any marketable adult hero image in Japan prevents their usage in games and creates a vicious circle of over-reliance on shonen, even to the point that Japanese developers can now only crudely ape the manly heroes they see as critical to international success.

Aren't the people who frequent this site significantly older then say 20? All I have to do is search up some 90's or 80's anime on google to find a shitload of muscled gorillas that you would think were made from the US.

How about something in the middle, say I don't maybe 25 being a good age? And how about middle class boxing weight/built- sound good everyone?

Or will it just be the usual either Left or Right extreme bashing argument that gets absolutely fucking nowhere??

to be honest i LIKE JRPGs because they are JRPGs... if i want to play a RPG with lots of choices, medicore graphics and D&D char developement i play western RPGs if i want 60-90h of story, awesome graphics and turnbased battle i play JRPG... i dont know where the problem is

an example is Cloud. sure he weeps and whine's alot but he has the right to. i mean your best friend dying in front of you, your idol betraying you, your best friends GF dying, not to mention his parents being killed, getting experimented in the last 4 years.

all this stuff kinda mind fucked cloud. if this were happen to you what would you do?

I definitely agree that Yuri is an exception. If Karol was the main character in Tales of Vesperia, Tales of Vesperia would've been typical, but thankfully, it was Yuri. He's not a kid, he's not conflicted all the time and he may have contradicted himself a couple of times in his "justice" views, but he's just different overall. He may not have developed much, but at least he wasn't whiny in the beginning and suddenly mature at the end.

I have an alternate theory which is that most writers started writing seriously when they were teenagers and a lot of their stories and their own self image starts there. They may grow older but they are still boys at heart and write accordingly.